Posts about twig

I’ve done it. I’ve moved entirely into the cloud. The process started a year ago when I bought my Chromebook Pixel. Well, actually, it started before that, when I shifted to Gmail and Google Calendar and Google Docs and that drove me to switch from iPhones to and Android phones and tablet and then to try a Chromebook. I still owned a Mac, but it did less and less, in the end just acting as a print server for my Google Cloud Print and as a Skype machine because (1) Microsoft refuses to make Skype for Chrome and (2) Leo Laporte whined about my using Google Hangouts on This Week in Google.

But last week, my Mac died. I/O error. I/O error. OK, OK, I get the point. It’s four or five years old; not worth fixing. It so happens that the moment it died I was trying to set up a Skype talk into a conference in Las Vegas. They couldn’t do Hangouts. So I had to call in on Skype from my Nexus 7 tablet and it worked. Check off one use for the old, dead Mac.

I went through a few false starts trying to check off the other function: printing. I got a Lantronix PrintServer for Google Cloud Print but it still required me to set up printers in Google and that still required having a Mac or PC. I’m using the Lantronix but I also wanted to make this test pure: no other computer required. I got a Brother printer that was alleged to be a Google Cloud Print ready but it wasn’t really. Then I got an Epson and it worked. The Epson has a web set-up I could handle on my Chromebook, arranging to print directly to it with no middleman. It even sends scans directly to my Google Drive.

Ding, dong, my personal computer is dead. I bought my first machine, an Osborne 1, in 1981. I turned off my last one 33 years later. Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani, and I talked about this at some length at the start of This Week in Google. Now Leo’s had some fun at the expense of my Pixel, though he has come around to like his. And so I asked whether for lots of people, we’ve moved past the idea of needing to own a computer that stores data and runs applications locally.

Of course, this move still depends on what you need to do with a computer. I write — in fact, I’ve just written a 55,000-word tome about the future of journalism (betcha can’t wait for that!) using my Chomebook and Google Docs and Drive. I use the web — Chrome, of course. I communicate — everything I could need except Skype. I share. I do basic photo editing. I don’t do rigorous photo or video editing; for that, I’d still need local storage and computing. Gina says she still needs to code locally. OK, but all that, too, could change as connections speed up to gigabit speed and as remote apps and servers continue to gain power over what a personal machine could do.

We also discussed the need for a security blanket: backup. As we chatted, folks in the TWiT chatroom gave us suggestions for local hard drives and for online services such as Backupify that can backup or sync data to another service, such as Dropbox. I’ll work that out next. (In the meantime, I backed up my tome to a thumbdrive.)

So now I live in the cloud. It doesn’t really matter what device I use to get to my stuff: my Chromebook, a computer anywhere with Chrome on it, my Android phone or tablet. I still run apps, but they, like my stuff, will follow me around.

Oh, and by the way, for the first time in decades, I no longer use any Apple or Microsoft products. That’s not because I have anything against either. I just don’t need them.

Welcome to the next era of personal computing without a personal computer.

The discussion around my posts on Google+ has been fascinating — vitriol against Verizon and a surprising level of customer support for T-Mobile and its service and data plans.

Here is where the saga began. Note how calm I am: I’m assuming this is just a bureaucratic screwup, not a willful act to violate the terms of the Block C spectrum auction and a consent decree against Verizon. I don’t hear anything over the weekend — understandable — so I wait until Monday to ask again.

I got confirmation that the device does work on Verizon’s network — it just *won’t* connect it. So I wrote the post below and crossposted it on Google+ with much conversation there.

Here is reaction to my FCC complaint against Verizon, which I filed with the Enforcement Bureau. Here was Verizon refusing to connect my unlocked device and trying to sell me one of their locked devices instead. I think that’s a violation of consumer law and I think I’ll go to the Federal Trade Commission on that.

Related: Here is a Guardian story reporting that phone companies did not put up a fight when handing our data over to the NSA. Whose side are they on? And here’s a Verizon executive slamming Google and other technology companies for “grandstanding” when they defend our rights against the NSA and its spying. Again, whose side are they on?

I still have not heard from Google on this matter. I’m disappointed but I will keep trying.

I’ll keep the reports coming.

: AND: Here is the post Verizon erased (along with a few years’ worth) in which it promised to follow the open network requirements of the Block C auction (thanks to a Buzzmachine commenter for finding it).

: UPDATES: Continuing to update this post to keep a record of coverage.

Verizon is working hard to undermine openness not just on wireless devices but across the Internet. In court last week, Verizon argued that it should be allowed to edit the Internet — blocking sites if it wants, or making them pay more to reach Verizon customers.

It’s all part of Verizon’s campaign to undermine the FCC’s authority to protect consumers online. This is like Exxon saying the Environmental Protection Agency lacks the authority to stop polluters from destroying the environment.

Jeff Jarvis has filed his complaint about Verizon’s blocking. It’s now up to the FCC to stop Verizon’s latest assault on open networks.

* Ars Technica also gives the matter good coverage. I disagree with their conclusion that Verizon will beat the regulators by approving the device soon. That does not wipe away their crime, which was delay and bogus certification.

The miracle of Google was that it could accomplish anything—let alone become the fastest growing company in the history of the world and the greatest disruptive force in business and society today—while being run by a committee, a junta, a council of the gods.

In management, as in every other arena of business, technology, and media, Google broke every rule and made new ones.

It should not be a shock that Eric Schmidt has stepped aside as CEO and made room for Larry Page. Schmidt was the prince regent who ruled until the boy king could take the throne while training him to do so. We knew that this would happen. We just forgot that it would.

When I interviewed Schmidt a few weeks ago and asked about pressure over privacy, China, and lobbying, he said, “This is not the No. 1 crisis at Google.” What is? “Growth,” he said, “just growth.”

Scale is Google’s greatest skill and greatest challenge. It scaled search (vs. quaint Yahoo, which thought it could catalogue this web thing). It scaled advertising (vs. the media companies that today don’t know how to grow, only shrink). It is scaling mobile (by giving away Android). It has tried to scale innovation (with its 20 percent rule)—but that’s the toughest.

How does Google stay ahead of Facebook strategically? The war between the two of them isn’t over social. The next, great scalable opportunity and challenge is mobile, which in the end will translate into local advertising revenue. Mobile will give Google (or Facebook or Groupon or Twitter or Foursquare … we shall see) the signals needed to target content, services, search, and advertising with greater relevance, efficiency, and value than ever. As Schmidt told broadcasters in Berlin last year: “We know where you are. We know what you like.” Local is a huge, unclaimed prize. The question is how to scale sales.

I have no special insight into the Googleplex. But I have to imagine that when the company’s three musketeers sat down and asked themselves what impediments could restrain their innovation and growth, they were smart enough and honest enough to finally answer, “us.”

As well as their holy trinity worked setting strategy and reaching consensus—the one thing I did hear from inside Google was that nothing happened if they did not agree—it has become apparent that Google became less nimble and more clumsily uncoordinated.

Google is working on two conflicting and competing operating system strategies, Android and Chrome. It bungled the launches of Buzz and Wave, not to mention Google TV. It is losing talent to Facebook. It needs clearer vision and strategy and more decisive communication and execution of it.

If it’s obvious to us it had to be obvious to them that that couldn’t come from Largey-plus-Eric. Google, like its founders, is growing up. It needs singular management. So let’s hope that Schmidt did his most important job well—not managing but teaching.

Now we will watch to see who Larry Page really is and where his own vision will take Google. Will he give the company innovative leadership and can Sergey Brin give it leadership in innovation?

I imagine we will see a new support structure for Page built from below now rather than from the side. I’m most eager to see how he will cope with speaking publicly for the company. Schmidt’s geeky sense of humor was not grokked by media. (When he set off a tempest in the news teapot saying we should all be able to change our names at age 21 and start over with youthful indiscretions left behind us, he was joking, folks. Really, he was.) Page is even less show-bizzy.

As for Schmidt: I have gained tremendous respect for him as a manager, thinker, leader. His next act will likely surprise us more than this latest act.

I think Facebook’s problem lately with its disliked like button (and Google’s problem with the start of Buzz) is that they confuse the notion of the public sphere—that is, all of us—with the idea of making a public—that is, the small societies we create on Facebook or join on Twitter. Private v. public is not a binary decision; there is a vast middle inbetween that is about the control of our own publics. Allow me to explain….

Flickr: taberandrew

I’ve been trying to understand the vitriol I’ve seen in some quarters about Facebook’s latest moves—because I don’t fully get it. Oh, I understand the confusion Facebook’s privacy changes and settings cause—as Business Insider said, “Online privacy is the new programming a VCR.” Read EFF’s disquieting timeline of the mutation of Facebook’s privacy policy and look at this brilliant visualization of how Facebook has made the private public. I understand the problem.

But why is the reaction to Facebook’s latest move—the like button—so swift and so fierce, so last-straw-on-the-camel’s-back to some? Gizmodo dyspeptically listed 10 reasons to quit Facebook. Gizmodo and Engadget founding editor Peter Rojas quitFacebook, as did Google’s Matt Cutts, and my This Week in Google boss Leo Laporte disabled his account for awhile. Three heavier heavyweights in our world it’s hard to find and when they lose trust—which is what happened—that’s a big deal, bigger than Facebook seems to realize.

Clearly, there’s something more going on here, something fundamental. Facebook overstepped a line and so I want to try to find that line. I think it may lay here:

Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg seem to assume that once something is public, it’s public. They confused sharing with publishing. They conflate the public sphere with the making of a public. That is, when I blog something, I am publishing it to the world for anyone and everyone to see: the more the better, is the assumption. But when I put something on Facebook my assumption had been that I was sharing it just with the public I created and control there. That public is private. Therein lies the confusion. Making that public public is what disturbs people. It robs them of their sense of control—and their actual control—of what they were sharing and with whom (no matter how many preferences we can set). On top of that, collecting our actions elsewhere on the net—our browsing and our likes—and making that public, too, through Facebook, disturbed people even more. Where does it end?

Facebook has been playing this tension since its early days. Remember the hubbub over News Feed: When Facebook aggregated our updates into feeds, it freaked users, even though Mark Zuckerberg pointed out that all these updates were already visible to us among our friends on their pages. Zuckerberg’s vision was right in the end; the News Feed is critical to Facebook’s utility, value, and growth and it presaged the appeal of Twitter. But even in the public Twitter, even though we are publishing to the world, we still have a measure of control; we decide whom to follow—that is, which publics to join.

So let me repeat: In Facebook, we get to create our publics. In Twitter, we decide which publics to join. But neither is the public sphere; neither entails publishing to everyone. Yet Facebook is pushing us more and more to publish to everyone and when it does, we lose control of our publics. That, I think, is the line it crossed.

The irony in all this is that I think Facebook has been profoundly redefining our notion of a public in ways that—judging by its actions—even it does not fully grasp. I am listening to a fascinating radio series (and podcast) on the CBC based on the work of a project called Making Publics. This group of academics began five years ago with Jürgen Habermas’ belief that the public sphere—the counterweight to the state as heard through public discussion and opinion—did not emerge until the 19th century. They also agreed that prior to the Renaissance and the 16th century, “public” referred to people with public standing in the social hierarchy—the elite—rather than to all of us. But then the Making Public team saw that during the 16th and 17th centuries, the printing press, theater, art—that is, the means to publish and present—as well as markets enabled people to create and join their own publics.

I am struck with how similar that moment of change is to the internet’s upheaval today. Gutenberg’s press—and the arts of painting and theatre and the skill of map-making—enabled a still-small elite to create publics; indeed, their hold on the public stayed in place until only a decade ago. Today, the web enables all of us to publish and thus to make publics and also to join new publics (and destroy the old, elite definition and control of the public). The three key inventions of the early-modern era that enabled this change were the compass, gunpowder, and the press. Our equivalents are—what?—the net, the web, and blogs. Berners-Lee is our Gutenberg. Or is it Ev?

Facebook refined the gross sense of publicness that blogs put in the hands of us all: everyone publishing to everyone. Its social network gave us the tools to create and join our own publics and gain control over what we make public and who can join it. That was a powerful gift that shifted the basis of interaction online from flaming to friendship, built on real identity and real relationships. Facebook helped civilize the internet. Yet I don’t think Facebook understands the value of that control because it continues to try to make us entirely public.

See once more Matt McKeon’s visualization of Facebook’s public evolution. Hear, too, Zuckerberg’s Law: “I would expect that next year, people will share twice as much information as they share this year, and next year, they will be sharing twice as much as they did the year before.”

People accuse Zuckerberg of killing privacy and of wanting it dead. I think that’s likely unfair. I think instead he does see a profound cultural shift, one that existed before him but one that he took advantage of and then served and refined: We connect by sharing. In his view, I’ll bet, he’s not killing privacy; we are. He’s fine with that. And to an extent, so am I, as I argue the value of publicness. But both of us miss this subtle but profound distinction between the public and a public at our peril. That’s the lesson I’m trying to learn here as I start to write a book about publicness (more on that later).

I will argue that we face choices today about keeping something private or sharing it with our public or with the public at large and that we need to see the benefits of sharing—the benefits of publicness—as we make that calculation. I will argue that if we default to private, we risk losing the value of the connections we can make today. I will argue that we need institutions—companies and governments—to default to public. And I will argue that the more we live in public, the more we share, the more we create collective wisdom and value. I will defend publicness. But I will also defend privacy—that is, control over this decision.

I would not be surprised to hear that Zuckerberg shares this gospel. I think he’s sincere when he says he sees Facebook as a tool to enable us all to change our world through connections. I think that’s why he’s pushing us to be public; it’s more than just a cynical commercial motive. Yet I think he gets in trouble when he doesn’t see these distinctions, which I’m trying to discern in our new definitions of private, public, publics, and identity. And so he risks blowing it. But I still think it’s not too late.

I don’t believe Facebook has gone evil—or gone rogue, as Wired insists. The problem for Facebook is more likely that it never defined evil—as in “don’t be evil.” Google is aware of its line, which is about losing value if it loses trust. Facebook seems almost unaware of its line and perhaps that’s because its is harder to find. I suggest they study 16th century history and the origins of the public as they reinvent the public.

* * *

Flickr: Matthew Burpee

All this is related to the question of identity online—related but different. What I publish can add up to my identity and with different publics I have different identities. So identity is a key component of our notions of publicness.

The admirable Diaspora Project is trying to build an open and distributed version of Facebook to let us publish, aggregate, and control our own stuff to make up our own identities. That’s great, but I think that, too, conflates the ideas of a public and the public; it does what Zuckerberg is doing by having us publish everything to all, except it gives us ownership of that. I’m not criticizing the effort at all; I think it’s great. I’m just saying that this isn’t a substitute for Facebook; it’s something different, something more public.

Having captured what it thinks is our identities online, Facebook now wants to be the enabler and controller of our identities. But because we don’t want our stuff on Facebook to be completely public, Facebook cannot be that hub of public identity. The Diaspora Project can. But I wonder whether the Diaspora Project—like ClaimID and OpenID—can succeed because I wonder what our motivation is to keep our identities updated. I have a reason to update Facebook for my friends there or this blog for you all or LinkedIn for my professional contacts or Twitter for my instant ego gratification. But I haven’t had a reason to keep ClaimID (on this page) up to date. That’s the trap the Diaspora Project needs to avoid.

And this is where I think that Leo Laporte and Gina Trapani collaboratively stumbled on a big idea related to identity on the latest This Week in Google. Gina talked about our motive to update Facebook and Leo said the equivalent for identity would come if Google put our profile pages on the top of the search results for our names. If the first result for Leo Laporte in search were Leo Laporte’s profile page, he’d be motivated to keep it up to date, to make it the canonical Leo page. Brilliant, I think. Google, are you listening? Facebook?

* * *

Other notes…. The problem with the launch of Google’s Buzz was related but not so subtle: By mixing our email with its Twitteresque platform, Buzz, Google mixed our private and public. It not only mixed our email connections with the idea of publishing to the world, it also robbed us of the chance to create and control our own publics. In another of its Snuffaluffagus moments, I imagine that Google thought it was doing us a favor by making a public for us: our readymade society. But that was precisely the wrong move, for we want to make and join publics on our own. That is the essence of controlling our worlds.

Yesterday’s Stern show appearance came because on This Week in Google, we’d made fun of Howard Stern for using Lotus Notes still and Howard’s geek guru, Jeff Schick of IBM, rose up in protest and invited me in to see how the show uses it.

Start with Stern technology: Schick said they they digitize everything — every show, every bit of audio, every press clipping, even everything sent into the show. They scan all the fan mail. They scan dildoes. This adds up to 100 terabytes of data. That’s stored at Howard’s office in New York (outside Sirius) — which is in addition to the audio that’s stored, of course, at Sirius (and backed up in New Jersey), and in addition to the video archives. Howard’s own 100tb is backed up at Howard’s beach house. Howard’s office has a T1 and business-class cable and a direct link to Howard’s apartment, which also has business-class cable, like his beach house (which has CAT5 cable in every all and multiple wi-fi networks for Howard and guests). Serious shit.

On air, I asked Howard whether all this means that fans will someday have access to it. He said yes. I don’t want to read too much into that but I keep hoping that if Stern leaves satellite, he’ll start an internet empire.

I think the economics work: Stern has proven, thanks to his move to Sirius, that his fans, by the millions, will pay $12 a month to hear him. He can charge less online and make more because he’d own it entirely and his cost structure — technology, programming, marketing — would be far less than Sirius’.

The technology isn’t quite there but it will be soon. We fans need to be able to listen to Stern in our cars in the morning. We need to able to listen to the internet. That is possible today. On the way to the show yesterday, I listened to it on my iPhone. (Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone in case Sirius or Apple cuts it off. But it’s legit; I pay for internet access and use my internet password to get access on the phone.) We can listen to shows we buy on our iPods (but it’s better live). I have no doubt the technology will arrive and soon — but soon enough for the end of Stern’s contract in December? We’ll see.

By the way, I also got to see what they’re talking about on the Stern show when they say “Gary Preview Page 2, second column, bottom, in yellow….” It’s Prophet, the Sirius system for storing and playing all audio and at their consoles they go to a page and there are boxes in color; touch the box and it plays.

Now as for Lotus: In their office, Jeff Schick and a colleague generously spent a few hours giving me a tour of what they can do. I’ll concede: It’s impressive. What impressed me is that IBM integrated the functions of the collaborative, social internet — email, Twitter, wikis, LinkedIn, Facebook, Facebook Connect, directories, blogs, calendars, Skype, bookmarks, tagging — in a way that I wish they would all interroperate: click on a name and get everything about them (contact, place, tags, bookmarks); pull together people in calls or calendars just by dragging them; see how people are sharing your documents; see how people are connected….

Only thing is, IBM had to essentially recreate the internet and all these functions to do that, both so they could integrate it all and so that it could operate behind corporate firewalls. We internet snobs make fun of that, but I understand why they do that. But as we talk about how our internet should operate — how open standards for identity, for example, should work — the irony is that we could look at the interlocked IBM platforms to see the promise of it. It’s closed, for a reason, but it shows what an open structure would look like if it operated on truly open standards. I wonder whether there’s an opportunity for IBM to offer these functions at a retail level.

So thanks to Jeff Schick, I got to see Stern’s technology and IBM’s and get onto the show and so I’ll take back my snickers about Notes, most of them.

I had the privilege of being on This Week in Tech with Leo Laporte, John Dvorak, and Baratunde Thurston right after appearing on This Week in Google with the aforementioned Leo, Gina Trapani, and Mary Hodder. Much fun.

This month’s MediaTalkUSA for the Guardian is up with guests Jay Rosen of NYU and Michael Tomasky of the Guardian. We talk about Politico’s rear-guard action against the Washington Post with its new local service; the election; the White House and Fox; and government support of journalism.

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Leo Laporte, creator of This Week in Tech and the TWiT network of podcasts, spoke before the Online News Association this week and presented the very model of the new media company: small, highly targeted, serving a highly engaged public, and profitable. (Full disclosure: I am a panelist on TWiT’s This Week in Google show.)

Laporte said he charges $70 CPMs for ads. Some questioned the $12 CPM we included in our New Business Models for News, though we went with a conservative middle-ground based on the experience of existing local businesses. If we had – as we will – instead forecast a new kind of local news business – highly targeted with a highly engaged public, like TWiT’s – the CPMs and bottom lines would have been exponentially higher. The companies are still small but they are profitable. Laporte said he has costs of $350,000 a year with seven employees now but revenue of $1.5 million and that revenue is doubling annually. It will increase more as he announces new means of distribution (to the TV; he believes that podcasting is too hard for the audience).

Rather than nickel-and-diming current business assumptions, we need to have the ambition of a Laporte and build the new and better media enterprise.

(I can’t figure out how to turn the Livestream auto-play off, so the video is after this link…)